Blood in My Eye [Paperback]

George L. Jackson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 19, 1996

Blood In My Eye captures the spirit of Geogre Jackson's legendary resistance to unbridled oppression and racism. His unique and incisively critical perpective becomes the unifying thread that ties this collection of letters and essays in which he presents his analysis of armed struggle, class war, facism, communism and a wide array of topics.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Blood In My Eye was completed only days before it's author was killed. George Jackson died on August 21, 1971 at the hands of San Quentin prison guards during an alleged escape attempt. At eighteen, George Jackson was convicted of stealing seventy dollars from a gas station and was sentenced from one year to life. He was to spent the rest of his life -- eleven years-- in the California prison system, seven in solidary confinement. In prison he read widely and transformed himself into an activist and political theoretician who defined himself as a revolutionary.

Product Details

• Paperback: 195 pages
• Publisher: Black Classic Press (December 19, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0933121237
• ISBN-13: 978-0933121232
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #113,507 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Prison Praxis and Radical Political Philosophy, April 23, 2003

By 

Dylan Rodriguez (Riverside, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blood in My Eye (Paperback)

The life praxis of assassinated prison intellectual and revolutionary George Jackson embodies much of the radical possibility embodied by the work of radical prisoners. Incarcerated in 1960 at the age of eighteen for a $70 gas station robbery, Jackson was given an indeterminate sentence of one year to life. His staunch disobedience to prison rules and officials, along with his principled and visceral hatred of confinement, spurred Jackson's political and intellectual transformation within the prison. As his political stature among California inmates grew, Jackson became a liability to state authority through his profound effectiveness as an organizer and educator of fellow prisoners-in fact, one can still find many (formerly) imprisoned and free people who testify to Jackson's mentorship as integral to their political formation. This praxis essentially guaranteed that Jackson would never again see the light of the outside, and his brutal, open execution on the concrete ground of San Quentin prison emblazoned the logic of state repression in spectacular fashion. It is an ironic, perhaps fitting testament to Jackson's lasting political legacy that a wall in the San Quentin prison "museum" contains a mounted trophy case of the high-powered rifle that killed him on August 21, 1971, along with a bronze plaque enshrining the name of the guard who pulled the trigger.
George Jackson was, in many ways, the personification of Frantz Fanon's paradigmatic "native intellectual." In Fanon's terms, Jackson's widely read Soledad Brother and Blood In My Eye became "literatures of combat," serving dual capacities as theoretical texts and mobilizing tools. Close analysis of Jackson's knowledge production reveals a general congruence with the third, revolutionary "phase" of Fanon's developmental conception of the revolutionary native intellectual:

"Finally in the third phase, which is called the fighting phase, the native, after having tried to lose himself in the people and with the people, will on the contrary shake the people. Instead of according the people's lethargy an honored place in his esteem, he turns himself into an awakener of the people; hence comes a fighting literature, a revolutionary literature, and a national literature. During this phase a great many men and women who up till then would never have thought of producing a literary work, now that they find themselves in exceptional circumstances-in prison, with the Maquis, or on the eve of their execution-feel the need to speak to their nation, to compose the sentence which expresses the heart of the people, and to become the mouthpiece of a new reality in action."

As Jackson found political agency in abrogating the image of the depersonalized, silent, debased prisoner, he recognized his own incarceration as the logical outcome of a collective plight. The destiny of human expendables, the surplus people left to languish under the advance of white supremacist capital, was death, addiction, unemployment, and mass warehousing. Jackson consistently articulated the tortured severity of his relation to the world in these terms, stating and re-stating the essential dialectic of capital that rendered antagonism, deviance, and disobedience the most generalized mode of existence for people like himself:

"...that's the principal contradiction of monopoly capital's oppressive contract. The system produces outlaws. It also breeds contempt for the oppressed. Accrual of contempt is its fundamental survival technique. This leads to the excesses and destroys any hope of peace eventually being worked out between the two antagonistic classes, the haves and the have-nots. Coexistence is impossible, contempt breeds resistance, and resistance breeds brutality, the whole growing in spirals that must either end in the uneconomic destruction of the oppressed or the termination of oppression."

This epistemology of resistance and antagonism structured Jackson's political praxis. It was precisely his refusal of an idealized, hopeful "peace" (along with a pedagogical willingness to articulate the grounds of his refusal) that may have made his political assassination virtually inevitable. Jackson believed that the structural inevitability of state repression formed a condition of resistance for prisoners and free people alike. Yet, embracing this condition could produce an existential suicide-the necessary condition for declaring war on power.

"This monster-the monster they've engendered in me will return to torment its maker, from the grave, the pit, the profoundest pit. Hurl me into the next existence, the descent into hell won't turn me. I'll crawl back to dog his trail forever. They won't defeat my revenge, never, never. I'm part of a righteous people who anger slowly, but rage undamned. ...I'm going to charge them reparations in blood. ...This is one nigger who is positively displeased. I'll never forgive, I'll never forget, and if I'm guilty of anything at all it's of not leaning on them hard enough. War without terms."

For George Jackson, the historic possibility of forging a utopic "new reality" could only emerge from the corporeal ashes of those who dared challenge the corporate state's programmatic killing of oppressed people in and outside the U.S. It was this imagination of a righteous political death, a glorified descent into hell mandated by a social formation that fed on the bodies of disobedients and disposables, that allowed for the creative rearticulation of the imminent, violent consequence of repression.

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A touching look into the struggle of 70s revolutionaries., July 26, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Blood in My Eye (Paperback)

This book offers an excellent, honest portrayal of the day to day reality of 70s black revolutionairies and it can be promised that once you begin reading, you will rush to the end.

This book takes you to the heart of the Black Power movement and is so intriguing because it is written by someone who lived, and died for a cause in which he believed.

So often books or studies that focus on this specific facet of the civil rights era dillute the reality of the moment, because they are writing from a mere spectator's point of view, rather than from the perspective of actual participants.

For this reason, this book should be a must read for anyone studying the Black Panther Party--if they want to know the principles, beliefs and hopes of the people.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful analysis on Oppression in America., July 2, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Blood in My Eye (Paperback)

George Jackson, a man imprisoned for robbery at a young age and given one year to life in the penal system. Self educated in jail by the works of Marx, Fanon, Mao, Che and many other revolutionary intellectuals. Powerful comments on Urban Guerrilla Warfare. A must read for anyone grappling with the question of How? How can we strike a blow at the Oppressors, read this book you will glean ideas, what you do with them is on you. peace!